


Too hard to be lived without

by harryromper



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Boys Kissing, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Heirlooms, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Wizarding Libraries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 10:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15338076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harryromper/pseuds/harryromper
Summary: “I should go,” Potter mutters, and whatever this strange moment is seems to have come to an end. Draco rubs clammy palms on his robes and gets back to his feet, but Potter doesn’t move. “To America, maybe,” he continues, looking up at Draco. “Have you been there?”Draco’s mouth falls open. He’s so confused. He can’t understand why Potter’s even speaking to him, let alone confessing plans to abandon his home. “New York,” he manages, his voice sounding strained. “We went to New York the summer of fourth year.”~Or, in which Draco manages to find some peace until Harry comes barrelling back into his life.





	Too hard to be lived without

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thanks to [@1degosuperego](http://1degosuperego.tumblr.com), who is more alpha than beta.

It’s supposed to be spring, but halfway through April the sun’s yet to make an appearance. Grey days stretch endlessly into one another, pressing a cold sky over a damp, miserable London. 

Draco’s flat has radiators that rattle, and so little insulation that he can hear when the man living above him takes a piss. He sleeps with a hooded Muggle sweatshirt on, snuggled under a pile of blankets warmed with charms that fade too quickly, wishing for winter to end.

He could move.

He caught himself staring a moment too long at the advertisement in the window of an estate agents’ in Islington last week for an elegant three-bedroom terrace house. It’s not like he can’t afford it. Complete with a walk-in shower in the ensuite and flawless ceiling moulding. But he’ll be damned if he spends one fucking knut of Malfoy money on himself. His mother: fine. He’s made sure her home in the Paris wizarding quarter is comfortable and elegant, that the house elves know she is to want for nothing. But when they passed his father’s sentence and the ancient magic transferred the Malfoy entail to Draco’s shaking shoulders, he knew there was nothing in those vaults he wanted.

And so far he’s managed. Taught himself what he needed to know to get by in the Muggle world. Eked out an existence from his personal vault: the birthday gifts and small bequests from the Black side of the family that he’d amassed over the years. And he’s earning his own money now. Not much of it, not nearly enough, but that there’s any at _all_ seems worth being proud of.

So he’ll keep this dingy little flat with the squeaking floorboard, and the refrigerator that opens the wrong way so that he always clips his knuckles against the wall, and the shower that can only wheeze too hot and too weak.

Because it’s his.

Each day he goes to Diagon Alley, head held high ignoring the stares and mutters, and he checks his Owl Box for messages.

It was Pansy’s idea.

She came to him a month after the trials when he was still in a numb sort of shock, sitting on the floor of his flat with his back against the musty sofa and trying to imagine how to be a person in the world. She asked him to fix an heirloom pendant that her grandmother had given her. She’d broken it as she fled the battle.

“I thought you might know how,” she said quietly, unable to really look him in the eye, perched uncomfortably on a wooden folding chair, her knees pressed together, ankles crossed, like a perfectly bred young Pureblood. The kind of person Draco no longer really knew how to be. “Because you were able to…” 

The silence stretched between them, an ugly visceral thing, and Draco could only see a bird, flapping helpless in the confines of an airless cabinet.

He took the pendant, tracing its design with a fingertip, and felt its magic pulse gently, wounded, under his touch. 

“The inscription is supposed to glow when the person who gave it to you is thinking of you,” she said. “But my grandmother sat right beside me and it doesn’t work. Not since I fell on it.”

Draco kept it a week, lacking anything better to do, picking carefully at the tangled strands of charmwork.

Potter had sent his wand back to him straight after the trials with a note that Draco had incendioed without reading, too overwhelmed that he’d escaped any kind of legal reckoning by virtue only of being underage. At first the hawthorn had felt wrong, like a shoe that was suddenly too tight. But as he worked carefully with Pansy’s pendant, it was as if the wand started to stretch and flex with him. To learn his touch again, fitting to his hand like a missing limb. Even working the tricky magic felt good, after weeks of nothing but the most basic hygiene and homecare spells.

After days of fiddling, Draco felt a strange jolt of pleasure when he found the frayed edges of the spells and realised what was wrong. He needed help, though, to work out what to do next and he knew the exact book he needed. For a moment, he thought about what it would be like: to apparate back to the Manor, warded to the teeth against intruders but otherwise abandoned. To let himself in to the library, the furniture covered in dust-sheets; slide the ladder to the right and climb up to the mezzanine where he’d spent so many happy hours as a child.

But then a blink and all he could see was his psychotic aunt flinging books in the air and using them for target practice, Nagini curling her body through the rungs of the ladder.

He couldn’t go back.

So he found himself in Ration Alley, walking all the way to the end for the first time in his life, where the Wynn A. Ellingham Wizarding Library sat. A squat, stone building with wide oak doors that his father had once described as a place only the _most destitute_ wizards would frequent. Those without libraries of their own. Draco wasn’t sure what he expected. A general sense of desperation and grim ceaseless poverty, he supposed. But as with so many things, his father was just wrong. Sunlight beamed into the building from high charmed windows. The rows of books were long and spacious and welcoming. In one corner, a witch read aloud to a group of wide-eyed children sitting on gently floating, brightly coloured tufted cushions.

If the librarian recognised him, she gave nothing away. She nodded at his requests with a friendly smile and showed him where to find the books he needed, and how to check them out with his wand. Even the books themselves, rather than feeling like dirty, shared, _public_ copies, felt well-used, well-loved. Cherished.

Two more days of research, and he was able to knit the tattered edges of the spells back together. Pansy wept when he showed her.

So Blaise brought him an intricately carved wooden box, inlaid with a single ruby. “Greyback and co,” he muttered, as if that explained everything, showing Draco where the wood had been smashed and repaired. “It holds some jewellery that’s precious to my mother, but neither of us can open it anymore.”

Then Nott brought him a table runner that was more than a century old. Gold embroidery down the centre was intended to shift throughout the meal, showing you what the next course would be, but now it was stained with blood and Merlin knows what. Draco retched when he saw it.

“My mother’s scared to use cleaning spells,” Nott shrugged uncomfortably. “It’s been in her family for generations and she can’t bear the thought of it not working any more.” Draco spent a week with books open all over his sofa, and the runner laid out on a sheet on the floor as he used delicate needlepoint spells to unpick the design and heritage-grade restoration charms to clean the fabric. Nott’s mother was so delighted she mentioned it to every single one of her friends and somehow it ended up in the _Prophet_. Just a couple of lines at the end of a story about ancient wizarding homes being restored after the war, talking about the Malfoy scion turning his hand to the delicate work of heirloom repair.

And that was when Neville Longbottom got in touch.

“This is amazing,” he said quietly, shifting the now-working mantel clock in his hands. Draco felt choked by all the things he seemed unable to say to his former schoolmate-turned-war hero. The apologies and the thanks and his own sheer inadequacy all tangled up in his throat.

“You should…I mean,” Neville paused and coughed awkwardly. “There should be a way to contact you to ask for this kind of help. There’s been so much loss and destruction. People want their lives back.”

And so Draco wound up with a small advertisement in the back pages of the _Daily Prophet_ that read “Abraxas Magical Repairs. Your precious mementos restored. Testimonials available. Owl Box 413. Diagon Alley.”

He didn’t put his name in the advertisement because that seemed like a sure way to invite trouble, but whenever someone owled him he sent them back a detailed letter on his personal stationery outlining his services, costs, and the testimonial of Neville Longbottom (Order of Merlin First Class), and inviting them to contact him again if they’d like to proceed. 

Some of them still do.

And so six months after Pansy’s locket, he puts the finishing wards back in place on the covers of a family grimoire that suffered terrible spell damage when snatchers raided the Stephenson home and wraps the restored book in clean parchment. He tugs on his overcoat and casts a tempus. If he apparates from the alley behind his building he can be at the owlery before it closes. He takes a book on enchanted bindings to return to the library while he’s there.

It’s no warmer in the wizarding quarter and Draco’s glad he changed into his robes, with their toasty weather charms. As he walks to Ration Alley from the owlery, he passes a new elvish wine bar—part of the ongoing regeneration of wizarding London. Warm light spills through its windows from the dozens of floating candles indoors, and when he makes the mistake of pausing to look he realises the place is packed with Gryffindors. A “congratulations” banner is slung across the bar, and he can see Weasley and Granger with their arms around each other, in the centre of the throng.

Draco hurries past, rushing into the peaceful warmth of the library. In the open space, a group of elderly witches are sitting together knitting, needles clacking soothingly in their laps. He lets his heart slow from a racing trot. There’s no good reason that seeing his former classmates produces such a gut-wrenching response, but he hasn’t had to deal with them in months now, and part of him had hoped he wouldn’t have to, at least for the time being. He catches his breath as he returns the book on bindings, searching out a small pile of advanced charms texts he’s been wanting to read. As he steps back out into the Alley he props the books on one hip as he tugs his scarf tighter around his neck. It’s fully dark now, and the gas lamps have stuttered into life.

He’s just thinking about whether he should apparate straight home or grab some food at the Leaky when someone rounds the corner too quickly and collides bodily with him. Draco’s armload of books clatter to the cobblestones.

“Fuck, I’m sorry. Sorry.”

Draco lets out a curse, because of course it’s Potter. Hair wild, above his ugly Muggle coat and stupid Gryffindor scarf. Draco crouches to collect the books that have scattered around him, unaccountably embarrassed that Potter will see where he’s been, that a Malfoy is reduced to _sharing_ _books_ with _strangers_ , before his brain catches up with himself and he realises just how little Potter would care.

Draco’s fight-or-flight response is raging. He’s sure Potter must be able to _hear_ the way his heart is pounding. He waits for Potter to say something, but he just sinks to the curb, running a tired hand through his hair as he reaches for last book that has tumbled out into the street.

He turns the small leatherbound volume over in his hands and looks up at Draco. There are dark circles under his eyes and Draco can smell the firewhisky on his breath, even at this distance.

“Library books?” he asks, sounding more surprised by that than by the fact of running into Draco at all. “Are you…going back?”

The question knocks the wind out of him. Potter means Hogwarts, he realises. The letter had come the month before, explaining the school’s reopening and the chance to sit for their NEWTs. Draco had stared at it in horror. He’d sooner set foot in the Manor again than ever walk the halls of that cursed castle. As if qualifications would help him now, anyway. 

He should go home, he thinks, panicked. Snatch the book out of Potter’s hands and disapparate. Or leave the fucking book, he can manage without it. Potter is noble enough to return it to the library. Probably.

Instead he finds himself shaking his head slowly, and sinking to the cold pavement beside Potter, his back against the lamppost. 

“Me neither,” Potter huffs out, running a finger back and forth along the gold lettering spelling out _Casterley’s Complex Corinthian Charms_. “Hermione thinks I’ll change my mind, but.”

Draco waits for the end of that sentence but it doesn’t come. The urge to flee is still all-consuming and yet he finds himself unable to move. Sitting here in the dark, damp seeping through his clothes.

“A fucking graveyard,” Potter seethes, breath making a cloud in front of him. “We’ve been through enough without…” He falls silent again, but his foot kicks out in frustration, sending a pebble clattering across the alley. Anger rolls off him in waves, and Draco isn’t sure if he’s even aware of the magical energy that pulses from him like a physical presence. He’s not really sure Potter’s even aware of Draco beside him.

“All pretending,” he continues, finally. “Like going back to school or joining Auror training or…getting _engaged_ …” The last word curdles from him, sour.

Seven years of habit breaks through Draco’s panic, and he opens his mouth to make an inevitable snide jab about the Golden Trio before catching himself. Potter doesn’t even notice.

“Like if we just make _believe_ that everything is fine, then it will be.” His words are slowed a little by the alcohol. “It’s bullshit.”

He reminds Draco of a cartoon character he’d loved as a child, who’d had a terrible temper and was always surrounded by a tiny thundercloud. It was supposed to be a morality tale, he thinks, looking back. But Draco had always been transfixed by the way the tiny lightning bolts had shot across the page.

Potter is his own thundercloud.

“I should go,” Potter mutters, and whatever this strange moment was seems to have come to an end. Draco rubs clammy palms on his robes and gets back to his feet, but Potter doesn’t move. “To America, maybe,” he continues, looking up at Draco. “Have you been there?”

Draco’s mouth falls open. He’s so confused. He can’t understand why Potter’s even speaking to him, let alone confessing plans to abandon his home. “New York,” he manages, his voice sounding strained. “We went to New York the summer of fourth year.”

“Did you like it?” Potter asks, his face suddenly open and genuine, scowl vanished.

Draco’s mind races, distracted by the way Potter’s bright eyes clash with the dark mauve smudges beneath them and his sallow complexion. He tries to remember anything about the trip other than how sick the international portkey had made him.

“We stayed at the Ritz. It was too hot,” he mumbles. “And Americans have no manners.”

Potter snorts, and the very beginnings of smile lift the corners of his mouth. He holds the book out, and Draco barely manages not to snatch it as he adds it to his pile, shrinking the stack and tucking it in his pocket. When he looks back, Potter is holding out his hand.

Draco sucks in a sharp breath, thinking back on his eleven-year-old self. _Their_ eleven-year-old selves. What is Potter even thinking? 

“Give me a hand, Malfoy,” he sighs. And Draco flushes as he realises this is not a _moment_ ; Potter just wants him to haul his unkempt carcass to his feet. He almost expects something to happen, as he grasps Potter’s hand. Some sort of charge to fire across their skin when they touch, but there’s nothing. Just Potter, now standing in front of him, dusting off his ugly coat and breathing firewhisky fumes in Draco’s face.

“You’ve gone pink,” Potter says quietly, stating the fucking obvious the way only a drunk person can. And before Draco can splutter any kind of excuse, he’s reaching out a curious finger and tracing one of his cheekbones. And then Draco can’t do anything at all. His throat dries up, and he doesn’t seem to be able to draw away, which would obviously be the sensible thing to do. It’s like a bodybind gone wrong, and given their history, that seems strangely appropriate. He wonders if Potter is about to take the opportunity to break _his_ nose.

The reality is so much worse, he realises, as Potter’s mouth descends on his. The kiss is hot and messy: Potter tastes like whiskey and cinnamon, and Draco’s eyes slam closed. Potter has one hand clenched tightly in the front of Draco’s robes and the other is pressed impossibly gently to the side of Draco’s face, and Draco’s whole sorry existence has narrowed down to the soft, wet press of Potter’s lips against his.

It ends as quickly and surprisingly as it began. Potter pulls back with a gasp, staggering a step backwards into the street. His lips are bright red and his eyes are flashing. The thundercloud is in full effect. Draco almost feels like he can _see_ it, a furious storm hovering above Potter’s scowling forehead, decorated with its very own lightning bolt.

“Fuck,” Potter spits out, as if disgusted with himself, and Draco’s heart sinks to the bottom of his stomach.

“ _Fuck_.”

Draco wishes for something, _anything_ , as a distraction. Someone to walk by… _anything_ to break this catastrophic silence that’s now stretching between them as he stands there uselessly.

Potter shoves up his glasses and rubs at his eyes with the heel of one hand, and for one horrifying moment Draco wonders if might be _crying,_ but then he pushes his glasses back into place and his expression is just cold.

“I’m not _gay_ , Malfoy.”

He manages to pack enough venom into that one syllable that Draco’s not sure it won’t leave a scar.

But it’s enough to break whatever has held Draco glued to the pavement. He shoves his hands in his robes, his fingers curling around his wand. Takes one last look at this awful, entitled, destructive, _chaotic_ boy in front of him. Hopes with all his heart that he does fuck off to America, or India or Timbuk-bloody-tu so that Draco never has to cross paths with him again. He lies with whatever dignity he has left.

“Neither am I, fuckwit. _You_ kissed _me_.”

Draco turns and disapparates away, eyes burning.

The following week the _Prophet_ does a three-page spread about the heroes of the war returning to Hogwarts. Skeeter devotes a half page to the Saviour’s mysterious absence. Granger is quoted as saying that Potter is taking “some well-deserved time to himself.”

Draco reads it while emptying his Owl Box.

There are seven new enquiries.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Hera Lindsay Bird's poem _[Having Already Walked Out On Everyone I Ever Said I Loved](http://shabbydollhouse.com/Having-Already-Walked-Out-On-Everyone-I-Ever-Said-I-Loved)_. Come say hi on [tumblr](http://harryromper.tumblr.com/) if you'd prefer.


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